Iceland’s improvement is characterized by small improvements in the economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment and political empowerment subindexes, resulting in a marked increase in the overall score. Most notably, the percentage of women in parliament increased from 33% to 43% and income and labor force participation gaps narrowed.

1. men are instinctively and destructively overconfident when investing

2. Iceland’s banks allowed men to explore those dismal investment instincts on a global scale.

As Lewis says:

Back in 2001, as the Internet boom turned into a bust, M.I.T.’s Quarterly Journal of Economics published an intriguing paper called “Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment.” The authors, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, gained access to the trading activity in over 35,000 households, and used it to compare the habits of men and women. What they found, in a nutshell, is that men not only trade more often than women but do so from a false faith in their own financial judgment. Single men traded less sensibly than married men, and married men traded less sensibly than single women: the less the female presence, the less rational the approach to trading in the markets.